Kai Risdahl

Just hours before that raid, somebody – we don't know who, which is part of the problem – made a bet on Polymarket that Maduro would soon be out of office.

The payout was $400,000.

And with such uncanny timing, red flags of the insider trading variety were raised.

And that's not the only instance that has made people sit up and pay attention.

So we called Joe Grunfest to talk it over.

He's a former commissioner on the Securities and Exchange Commission, also an emeritus professor at Stanford Law School.

Professor Grunfest, welcome to the program, sir.

It's a pleasure to be with you, Kai.

Just to make sure everybody's got the baseline knowledge here, Polymarket and Calshi and those other betting markets, describe them for me, would you?

How do they work?

Basically, they're prediction markets.

You can take virtually any event.

You can transform it into the equivalent of a binary prediction market.

Will something happen?

Will something not happen?

And then you can place a wager, bet, investment, whatever you want to call it, and you wind up getting paid if you were right, and you wind up losing if you were wrong.

It's just like life that way.

Yeah, it is.

I'm not being pejorative when I call it a betting market, right?

Well, that depends upon who's listening.